Ringworld
Let me start out by removing a few caveats.
I’ve read three of Larry Niven’s collaborations with Jerry Pournelle.
A Mote In God’s Eye, Footfall, and the absolutely magnificent Lucifer’s Hammer.
So it’s not a case of disliking the writing style from an earlier era, with more build up, more characterization, and less urgency. I’m a fan of those elements. The problem was, that the influence of Jerry Pournelle apparently gives the books a much better flow and the characters more depth. But that’s only half of the failing of this book, as the other, and arguably greater portion, is that Larry took the easy way out.
It’s like when a movie about a worldwide pandemic only focuses on one small and stationary group of people, and none of them manage to accomplish much.
Slight spoilers, but a crew arrives on an alien world, everything revolutionary has already occurred, the author fails to elaborate on any of the details, and all that’s left are primitives. The struggle to leave the Ringworld is essentially the whole book, and even then it ends abruptly.
